Google Vs. China : The war has begun

Google Vs. China. It was bound to happen and it did now. I mean it was happening in the form of cold war but now, everything is public.

Few activist’s from China were hacked by Chinese authorities (mostly) and that the services used by these activists were from Google and Yahoo! prominently. I think Google was planning some sort of answer to chinese authorities and this gave Google an amazing opportunity to speak away.

Google.com was blocked in China years down the line, but later became accessible after 2006 with the launch of Google.cn when Google was asked to censor results because China did not want chinese people to be affected by the “Western Culture”.

Western Culture meant a lot, and Google had to censored so many results in accordance with China. I mean Google had to do it to get into the market of the country which has the largest internet user base of 380+ Million users.

Now the struggle broke out after accounts being hacked and Google has said that they will no longer obey Chinese authorities rules and censor results as they believe in free information for everyone and also they decide to go by their mantra, “Do no evil”.

This could be start of a bigger rebellion later on, but for now Google has threatened Chinese authorities to leave China. Google currently has less then 1000 employees who currently are on holidays.

One of the most important step Google had taken quite early was not storing user data physically in China because if it was so, they would have to submit to the will of China just like what Yahoo! had done leading to imprisonment of chinese activist and reporter.

Google went uncensored after the announcement on it’s blog and thats when the web went on fire. Frankly speaking even if chinese governments let go of Google, it won’t be a big loss to china as Google only has 37% of the search market share while Baidu, has about 58% so bad luck Google.

Well, for other services then search like mail and Android too could be a major loss to China.

Google also won’t have a major loss as the profits they were making in China were not high owing to low market share. This whole act brings up the matter, wasn’t internet supposed to be free access to information and free meaning freedom provided to user? Share your thoughts in the comments.